


Duran Duran and Venn Diagrams

by KateAtTheClose



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Bad guys, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Poison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-08
Updated: 2013-10-08
Packaged: 2017-12-28 19:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/995901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KateAtTheClose/pseuds/KateAtTheClose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles would admit readily to his vast knowledge of every horror-comedy-adventure-thriller-what-have-you zombie movie cliché, but it turns out that means diddily-squat when faced with real re-animated corpses and the men who love them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duran Duran and Venn Diagrams

**Author's Note:**

> Found this on my hard drive, and thought I'd share it. Altered a bit from its original state to bring into vague post-season 3 continuity.

“You’ve got to be _fricking_ kidding me,” Stiles slammed a hand down onto the console of his jeep, mentally telling himself he’d make it up to her with a nice, tender wash as soon as ‘imminent peril’ became merely ‘potential peril.’

 

“Come on, come on, come _on_!”  Stiles leaned in close to the radio, listening with the sort of dedicated intensity that usually came with breaking into safes, but here was accompanied by varying degrees of fuzzy static.  Of _course_ he’d had to wait in _just_ the right place on the outskirts of Beacon Hills for the radio to struggle to pick up the _one_ local st-

 

_“-con Hills’ own Light 92.7, your one-stop-shop for news, traffic, and tunes to steer you through your day in one piece…”_

 

“Ah ha!”  Stiles flailed away from the dial, staring at the now audible radio.  “Oh thank god.”He mumbled tiredly, and then glanced at the clock.  Two minutes after the hour, and he launched into an internal monologue about the necessity of radio stations not airing calls live for pre-vetting and censoring purposes. 

 

_“-time for a request, lets go to the line.  Hey there, what can I do ya for?”_

Stiles froze.

_“Hey man, could you play Duran Duran’s_ Hungry Like the Wolf?”

 

That was the signal – a request called in to the station. Different songs meant different things, and it had been his bright idea after someone had tampered nefariously with the cell phone network in town.  He could just imagine Scott grinning like a doofus as he said it, despite everything, and gave an answering proud smirk as he knocked the jeep into gear to the sound of some early eighties New Wave.

 

_

 

Once he drove his jeep into Jackson “Mr. Lizard” Whittemore through a wall, it was open season on asking Stiles to save the day with his precious jeep.  His protests fell on deaf ears, as he was constantly reminded that he was neither a werewolf, a were-lizard, a banshee, nor an Amazon warrior princess.  His claims that he could still become the latter with a truly fierce leather bustier fell on deaf, if somewhat amused, ears.  Since sarcasm couldn’t (yet) be wielded satisfactorily in battle, he was relegated to distractions, pack driver, and occasional spreader of mountain ash.  He still wielded a baseball bat like a slugger with something to prove, but he’d be the first to admit when pressed that his abilities in a crisis were more of the ‘wink and a prayer’ variety then the truly reliable kind.

 

When the monster-of-the-week – alright, humans jacked-up on special plants with a disconcerting affinity for zombies – hightailed it down the forest-lined road, Stiles was there leaning oh-so-nonchalantly against his jeep, effectively blocking their way.  Their pickup skidded sideways to a stop, and they’d barely kicked the doors open, guns and knives in hand, when Derek and his pack materialized growling out of the forest.

 

When the teeth, eyes, and sideburns came out, Stiles knew to skedaddle.  He may not be the most coordinated or strapping of young men, even if he filled out his lacrosse uniform just _fine_ thank-you-very-much, but he could still get himself the heck out of dodge.  He pushed himself down behind a substantial tree trunk a little ways into the woods, pressing his back against the moss and rotting wood, and somehow managed to still darkly hope no spiders disappeared down his collar despite the more significant concerns of homicidal outdoorsy-types with a pressing interest in necromancy.  Well, an interest in raising the dead, and a voracious dislike of the werewolves who could smell the decaying bodies stirring in their territory’s graveyard, anyway.  Stiles would admit readily to his vast knowledge of every horror-comedy-adventure-thriller-what-have-you zombie movie cliché, but it turns out that means diddily-squat when faced with real re-animated corpses and the men who love them.

 

At least, at the very _least_ , there were no actual zombies to worry about, because they’d caught the guys in the act, and re-killed the corpses last Tuesday.  You know, a typical Tuesday night, when trips to the graveyard occurred post lacrosse practice and pre dinner.  And nothing got the appetite roaring like a spirited conversation on the way home about whether or not having your brain eaten was a legitimate concern.

 

The thing about Stiles staying out of trouble was that even with his Adderall, his ADHD kept him from being able to stay particularly still for any period of time, not when his knee started bouncing or his fingers started tapping a furious staccato against his thigh without him even noticing.  With his friends in a fight a few meters away, and able to hear the growls and shouts while he bit the inside of his cheek and counted the seconds, he wasn’t the most effective of hide-and-seekers.  He would be winning no medals in any district championships, were that to be a thing that existed.  Then again, he was going for the out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach rather than true really expecting to fool anyone, given that he hung out with those of the super seeing, smelling, and hearing brigade. 

 

So it was that Stiles, even with his puny human senses, heard the man behind him a moment before he lunged at him with a knife. 

 

He scrambled back with a shout, feet scraping for purchase in wet leaves, hands catching on a fern and dragging himself up to his feet in time to back away, hands up, palms out.  “Human,” he said, voice higher than he would ever admit to hearing it.  Where the hell was his baseball bat?  Oh right, in the backseat of his car, being useless.  “Fully, definitely and definitively human.  All the way.  Card-carrying member.  ‘Til the cows come home.”

 

The Crying Human defence was tried and true, especially with hunters who followed whatever version of the code was hip right now, and occasionally with supernatural beasties with a more specific vendetta.  It was apparently less effective, however, with those on herb-steroids who aspired to raise the dead. 

 

Mr. Plaid ‘n Beard adjusted his grip, stepping in closer to Stiles while he readjusted his grip on the knife.  Stiles stepped back, blindly pushed a branch aside and glancing up towards the road where the main fight was taking place.  He couldn’t see a damn thing in the darkness, and searched the forest floor around him for a stick, a rock, anything to fight back with.  All he could see was dirt, pine needles, and foliage.  He looked back up at Plaid ‘n Beard, just in time to see the knife flash out at him.

 

Stiles threw himself to the side, something hot burning along his ribs, dropped his shoulder and tackled Plaid ‘n Beard in a hit that Coach Finstock would have been proud of.  The man’s elbow holding the knife was caught under him, and Stiles grappled with his wrist as the man used his greater size to try and throw him off.  He was shoved onto his back, winded, neck twisted against a tree root, but he didn’t let go of the wrist he held, keeping it twisted away from him, pushing away to kip the edge from his skin. 

 

Stiles was a lot of things, but one of them was stubborn.  It was that stubbornness that kept him on the lacrosse team after years on the bench, that kept him in love with Lydia despite knowing all her dark corners and the most thorough rebuffs, that kept him following a lead to help the pack even if he’d had to lie to his father.  Once he dug his heels into something, he didn’t let go, come hell or high water, both of which were, consequently, fairly likely given recent precedent. 

 

Mr. Plaid ‘n Beard shoved him back against the ground, and Stiles’ vision suddenly whited out as a rock-hard tree root collided with his head, but he didn’t let go. He pushed back, struggling, forcing the man’s wrist back, back, back, past the sudden resistance, and then suddenly Plaid ‘n Beard gasped, a sick, wet sound, and Stiles blinked past his blurry vision to see the man’s knife sticking out of his own chest.   

 

The man fell back, and Stiles scrambled out from under him, feeling a creeping numbness all over.

 

“Oh my _god_ ,” he said, as blood bubbled out of the corner of Plaid ‘n Beard’s mouth, the man’s hands curled loosely around the hilt of the weapon he didn’t even try and pull out.  “Not such a weak lil’ human after all, huh?” he crowed breathlessly.

 

The man’s dark and glassy eyes caught on Stiles, his lips moving but no sound coming out, the blood sliding down his chin.  His eyes panned to Stiles’ chest, then moved back up to his face.  He released a wet breath in a grotesque facsimile of a laugh, and carefully formed his lips around one word. 

 

“Poison,” he said, in the faintest whisper of a voice, but victory was in the lines of his face anyway. 

 

Stiles froze, mind slipping, and he pressed his hand against his ribs, against the centre of the heat, numbness, and now, sharp and spiking pain.  He peeled it away, and blood was dark on his palm and fingers.  In that moment, he heard a sharp intake of breath, and looked up to see Plaid ‘n Beard’s lifeless hands fall away from the knife he had just shoved deeper into his chest. 

 

The poisoned knife.  The poisoned knife that had left the long, sharp line of pain along Stiles’ left side, that he now realized had soaked his shirt and sweater with wet, warm, and now tainted, blood.  

 

“Scott,” he said, voice a weak, breathless whisper.  “Scott!” He tried louder, dragging up a knee to get to his feet, and dropping back to the ground.  “Scott, Derek, somebody.”

 

He blinked, and then he was facedown on the forest floor, the smell of pine needles sharp in his nose. 

 

The next thing he knew, vibrations were thrumming through his whole body, loud and getting closer, until he was bodily pushed over.  He blinked again, and there were faces above them, lips moving, and Stiles squinted as the sounds he was hearing faded from a dull din into separate voices.  Someone was pressing something to the fiery brand on his ribs, and that _hurt_.

 

“Ow,” he said eloquently, grabbing at whoever was above him.  Allison’s big brown eyes looked down at him behind loose strands of her hair.  A part of his always-multitasking mind was thankful that she was the one doing any kind of first aid, because at least she could relate to the whole human-lack-of-healing-power-thing.  Allison’s eyes moved to the side, and then Scott was leaning over him, hair shaggy but nary a fang in sight.  And, alright, he took it back, he wanted Scott to be helping on the first aid front, because he was practically an apprentice vet at this point, and the big lug could comfort things in pain, Stiles had seen him.

 

“Hey dude.”  Scott was lifting him to his feet, an arm slung around his shoulders, keeping him upright when Stiles’ legs started to buckle.  Allison ducked under his other shoulder, and between the two of them they dragged him out of the woods, towards his jeep.  The lights were on, reflecting off the windshield in the darkness, the door open and waiting for them. 

 

“Scott,” Stiles coughed on it, feeling like someone had tightened a vice around his chest.  “Poison.”

 

“What?” Lydia said, her voice sharp, from around the door as she pulled Stiles into the backseat of his own car.  “What kind of poison, Stiles?”

 

 So demanding, that was Lydia all right. 

 

“On the knife,” Stiles said, because he’d thought that much would be obvious, Miss Genius-O-Lot.  Alright, so he wasn’t at the top of his game in the wit department.

 

There were terse voices outside, and then Scott pushed in beside him, holding the bunched up fabric of his sweater tight to Stiles’ side.  The door up ahead slammed shut as Allison took the co-pilot seat, turning fiercely to the driver. “Drive!” Stiles caught a flash of Isaac’s face as he leaned back to make sure everyone was present and accounted for, and then the tires screeched across the pavement as his jeep took to the road.  His poor, traumatized jeep. 

 

Lydia was holding his hand, other tucked into the curve of his arm.  Ahead, Isaac was silent and Allison was speaking rapidly into her cell phone.  Sweat was slick on Stiles’ skin, but he had started to shake from the cold.

 

“Cora’s going to sit on the zombie squad, Derek’s bringing the knife to Deaton to get a sample, then gunna bring it to the hospital, where you’re going.”  Scott explained, as Stiles slumped against him, his heart beating as fast as a panic attack.  Odd, since he felt so exhausted, without the breathless panic that accompanied those old charming experiences.   The pain felt less, but how much of that was from Scott’s wolfy pain-relieving voodoo, and how much was from the spreading numbness he wasn’t quite sure.  Either way, it quieted the hamsters that ran rampant on the wheels of his brain, and Stiles, for once, stopped thinking for a little while.

 

-

 

He was hot, so hot, and wow, where did that heater come from, and could someone _please_ turn it off, or turn on the air conditioning, or something?  Someone was holding his hand, nice and tight, and it didn’t go anywhere when he squeezed it back when he could. 

 

Time refused to move forward in a steady and coherent manner, and instead he hazily opened his eyes to Melissa McCall wiping a cloth across his forehead, then blinked and it was his Dad crouching at his side, both hands wrapped around his one, face lined and drawn, and then he blinked and it was Lydia holding his hand, hair fallen messy around her face, and then it was Scott with Allison, peering down under his bandage at his wound.  Because it was a wound, definitely, not a scratch anymore, and he only caught a glimpse of it, puckered and dark lines spreading outwards, as Scott rubbed something into it that made it _burn_ until he writhed on the bed and Melissa and his dad caught his shoulders so he wouldn’t fall out _._

The numbness was gone, although the heat stayed, his sheets sticking to his limbs, and the pain eating at him from under his skin.  He blinked, and Derek was the one holding his hand, no one else in the room, some of his pain bleeding away, but not enough to count. 

 

“-found the ones that got away in the forest, and-“

 

“-it won’t be too long now-“

 

“-hang on, Stiles.”

 

It figured that Derek would say the most when Stiles wasn’t in any condition to understand much of what he was saying, but then he blinked again and Melissa was the one with him, packing ice against his overheated skin.

 

Nothing much made sense after that, and he burned alone with the flames licking patterns through his eyelids.

 

Until he opened his eyes, and things came into focus, with the sort of normal second-by-second progression of time that he now figured he should associate with consciousness.   He shoved at the sheets baking him to a crisp, and looked down at the bandage across his abdomen, neatly taped down.  He reached for it with his left hand, and the grip around his right tightened.

 

“Hold it right there, kiddo.”  His dad smiled at him tiredly when Stiles rolled his head over to look at him.  “It’s healing now, so don’t mess it up, huh?”

 

“Got it,” Stiles said, his voice coming out hoarse and rusty.

 

“Your friends are in forced exile in the hallway, but I’ll go get ‘em.  They’ll want to explain this whole thing, and I could use a cup of coffee.” He said gruffly, but he paused, patting his other hand over Stiles’ where he held it, nobly holding back on the father-son hug for the sake of medical safety, and then de-clasped Stiles’ hand to let in Scott, Allison, and Lydia. 

 

“Stiles!” Scott barrelled into the room and promptly disregarded the kind of restraint the Sheriff had shown, and leant in for an awkward half-hug that Stiles could only flap his hand weakly against Scott’s shoulder for.  The girls were at least a little more decorous, and waved at him from his bedside. 

 

“Hey,” he said.  “So, the zombie squad?”

 

“That’s been sorted out.” Allison assured him, with a terrifying degree of satisfaction. 

 

“Lumberjacks and botanists should not overlap.” Lydia informed him, with eyes that meant business.  “That should never be something that can be a Venn diagram.”

 

“Deaton was faster than poison control at figuring out the main ingredient of the poison, so we could slow it down some.” Scott explained, when Stiles kept looking at them expectantly.  At least that explained his vague memories of Scott rubbing something into his wound.  Revolting, but with results that Stiles couldn’t fault.

 

“But they couldn’t figure out the other component, so we had to track down the one guy who got away when we cornered them in the woods.” Allison continued.

 

“It was-“ Lydia started, but Allison’s hand shot out and gripped her arm, shaking her head decisively.  “Something totally gross and corpse-related, that you do not need to know, since it was in your body.”

 

“Awesome.” Stiles said, letting that go with the sort of self-restraint that deserved an award of some kind.

 

“We got you the antidote, and your dad added him to the cells with the rest of his crew – well, the ones who survived, anyway.” Scott added, then his face lit up in a grin as he remembered something.  “Hey, high five on turning the tables on knife-wielding Alcide wannabe.”

 

Stiles dutifully lifted his hand for a high five, even if he wasn’t so sure that he should be proud of killing a guy, even if he was a zombie-loving-psychopath.

 

“Dude, _True Blood_ references, really?” Stiles asked tiredly, as Isaac poked his head in the door, and then Cora and Derek followed him in.

 

“What, I’ve been watching it with Allison.” Scott said shamelessly, as Allison smirked at his side. 

 

“Good call, with the beard and the plaid, I totally see it.” She agreed.

 

“If you’re so judgemental, Stilinski, how come you knew what he was talking about?”  Lydia arched an eyebrow.

 

“Boobs,” Stiles said, and it figured that his father and Ms. McCall joined the already crowded room at just that moment.  “Lots of boobs.”  Because this was his life, and that’s just the sort of thing that happened.

 

 


End file.
